Here is the weekly summary for Securities Docket’s Web Watch (”This Week’s Best Blog Posts and Columns”):
The former CEO is back-and squealing. He claims that he is “living a nightmare” because the criminal investigation is taking such a long time and he finds himself facing the possibility of having personally to pay his legal bills. Well, “Quelle domage.”
Risk managers know to put extra focus on traders who are struggling and, for that matter, on traders who seem to have an eerily hot hand. Here are seven “habits” that an investor should look out for.
Since the Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal emerged, key questions have been “how” and “who.” How did he bilk so many people for so long? Who else knew and helped him?
It now appears that the biggest winner in Madoff’s scheme may not have been Madoff at all, but a secretive businessman named Jeffry Picower.
Buried within Pres. Obama’s historic new proposals to oversee and regulate the financial markets is the outline of a provision that garnered no headlines but might well become the most effective new anti-fraud regulation of all: rewarding whistleblowers.
There’s no doubt that Russia is the modern world’s undisputed red-tape colossus, which impacts foreign investors.
Investor schemes and market abuses often do not stop at a country’s border. With modern technology, such conduct is often carried out far from the perpetrator’s location. In response, the SEC has developed a sophisticated cooperative mechanism globally.
“On the white collar Richter scale of impact, this Stanford case looks a lot lower than Enron…. There are serious allegations here, but if Madoff’s a black swan, Stanford’s a black duckling.”
In comparison, despite its scope, Madoff’s scheme was rather simple, and the Stanford prosecution promises to be much more complex, with attacks on cooperating witnesses and questions about obstruction of justice to flavor the case.
It is worth noting a decision that relies entirely on the safe harbor to dismiss the plaintiffs’ securities fraud claims.
The allegations against Stanford sound exactly like a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So why wasn’t Stanford charged under the FCPA? The Justice Department isn’t saying. But a few reasons come to mind.
Enron litigation is like an ex-girlfriend whose house we can’t help driving past on our way home from work, even though she is now married with three children and has a restraining order against us. We can’t quite let go.
A mechanism to settle group claims in The Netherlands may influence U.S. courts to place further limits on jurisdiction for foreign plaintiffs, while also providing a way for foreign issuers to effectively settle collective claims outside of the U.S.
The question from everyone connected to Bernie Madoff’s sons is: How could they not have known their father was perpetrating a $65 billion fraud?
